President Obama visits a truck manufacturing plant Wednesday: The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, the third straight month with a 200,000-plus gain. John W. Adkisson/Getty Images

March 9, 2012

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It's getting better all the time. The Labor Department announced on Friday that the economy gained an impressive 227,000 jobs in February, the latest in a spate of reports indicating that the economic recovery is "growing stronger." The feds' revised stats for December and January also show that the economy added 61,000 more jobs than previously estimated. (The December number jumped from 203,000 to 223,000, and January leaped from 243,000 to 284,000.) The jobless rate, however, remains unchanged at 8.3 percent, as more unemployed workers returned to the labor force to look for jobs. Here, six takeaways:

2. Even the public sector looks betterThe government shed 6,000 jobs in February, as cash-strapped state and local governments laid off workers to stay afloat. But that's "negligible" in the big picture, says Brad Plumer at The Washington Post. For years, "the public sector has been absolutely hemorrhaging workers — around 500,000 since Obama took office." In 2011, government slashed 22,000 jobs a month. Thankfully, that "trend appears to be winding down."

3. But the rate of hiring isn't fast enoughThe economy is "adding jobs quickly enough to feel like growth," but "it's not nearly fast enough to return the economy to full employment," says Matthew Yglesias at Slate. "For that, we'd need a nice string of months in the 300,000-400,000 range." Remember, the Labor Department still says that 12.8 million Americans are unemployed.

4. And the recovery could still be derailed"The recovery has been here before," says Shaila Dewan at The New York Times. Early last year, we saw 200,000-plus jobs added for three straight months. But thanks to the European debt crisis, the Japanese earthquake, and other global factors, job growth soon slowed to "a crawl." Yeah, "everyone got burned last year," economist Ellen Zentner tells the Times, "from being elated over the better economic data only to have their hopes dashed come spring." So let's not "breathe easy" quite yet.

6. …And bad news for the Republican candidates The jobs report puts the Republican presidential candidates, who have been slamming Obama's economic stewardship, in a pickle, says Michael Shear at The New York Times. Business-savvy frontrunner Mitt Romney will "have to find a way to explain the contrast between an improving economy and his criticism" of Obama's policies. He faces the difficult task of convincing voters that the "job growth in recent months would have been better if someone other than Obama" had been in charge. "Someone like himself."